


Safehouse

by doomedship



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-24
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-16 14:54:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16088402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: “How annoying to be in Anne Sampson’s debt after all.”





	Safehouse

**Author's Note:**

> This is rambly. And I haven't checked it. But it's fix-it fluff. Much love, Bodyguard fandom. #Justice4Julia

"Where are we going?"

He's tired and impatient, worn out from the hellish weeks he's had since... well, since his world was blown apart more or less literally, on the stage of a London college, the altar stained with Julia's blood.

A stalling, frustrating investigation, leading by luck more than anything else to the arrest and conviction of no fewer than three serving police officers, an infamous crime lord and Nadia, the snake in the grass all along. He thought it would fix things, would give him some respite to at least know who to blame, but in the end it's really just a hollow victory. Julia is still gone and it's still an open wound bleeding out just under the surface of his skin. Each day he’s a little more drained.

"Look, Sarge, I'm under instructions to take you to this address and I don't know any more than you do," replies Pete, the driver, exasperated by David's near-constant harassment on their thirty-minute drive. He makes a sharp right and David sighs and rests his head against the window. Tries to think what absurdity Anne Sampson's got lined up for him this time.

Finally, the smart black Merc pulls up at the edge of a leafy square, tall Georgian townhouses he'll never come close to affording lining the curved street.

"68 over there, Sarge," says the driver, opening David's door. David climbs out, glances at the driver once, and moves warily towards the house marked 68.

Subtly, he checks his Glock is in place as he reaches up to press the doorbell.

It's a youngster who opens the door, and he barely looks old enough to shave. He doesn't look much like a killer assassin but after everything, that does little to lower David's guard and he shoots a threatening glower at the youth instead. The boy pales.

"P-PS Budd?" He asks as bravely as he can, and David gives a curt nod. 

"I'm here on Commander Sampson's orders," he says shortly. "Said you'd be expecting me."

"Yes, sir," says the boy rapidly, and David almost feels sorry for him. "My name is James, sir, I work for the Home Office-" James's eyes flick side to side nervously as he tails off and it does little to allay David's concerns about this. He doesn’t trust Mike Travis as far as he can throw him.

James stands aside and lets David into a neat hallway with neutral paintings lined up on the walls. There’s a vase of fresh purple flowers in a vase, and their scent stirs something in him.  

"If you'll come with me, I'll, erm-" James doesn't seem to know how to finish his sentence and falls silent as he leads David up the stairs, tripping over his own feet. A deadly assassin he is not.

At the top, he opens the second door and shoots a nervous look at David, and waits for him to approach.

"Look, I don't know what bullshit this is about, but why don't you just spit it out and tell me what the hell Sampson’s-"

"David."

It's like the air is suddenly drained of oxygen.

The word is so soft, almost imperceptible, but it rings like a bell toll in his mind. James, the buzz of traffic, the grand house, all of it fades away in that solitary second. If he's ever experienced anything truly heart-stopping (and honestly, he's escaped two dead man's bombs by this point), it's this moment.

He can't speak, can only stagger through the door to peer into the half-light. To confirm what he doesn’t believe his eyes are telling him.

She is there.

Leaning against the windowsill, she looks smaller, more fragile than she did, and there's tiredness etched into every weary line on her face. But there is no mistaking it's her. Not dead. Alive.

_Not dead. Alive._

It repeats in his head like a drumbeat and suddenly he's so shocked he forgets how to breathe, leaning heavily on the doorframe as his heart starts to pound. He breathes so fast it’s almost a panic attack, and he forces himself to breathe, to regain control. He chokes on a word, then another one, before he finally manages her name.

"Julia," he croaks, stumbling a few steps into the room towards her. The door clicks shut behind him.

She looks stricken; she swallows hard and pushes off the windowsill slowly, and makes her way across the room. It's an odyssey of sorts, and she's leaning heavily on an armchair, the side table, the back of the sofa. She's clearly injured but she is so fucking whole it makes his heart scream with triumph and with agony all the same.

"I'm sorry," she says, haltingly, but the tone she uses has the same steely conviction underneath as when she told him why she knew the name of his children's school. The same ‘I'd do it again if I had to’, just like that very last conversation he had with her. _Our choice._ "About all this,” she says at last, and then waits. Waits for him to catch up. To stop gasping. To wake up from this illusion.

"What-" he says, and his brain lets him down again so he can't formulate a single sentence. She is close enough to touch now and he is torn between running away and doing just that. He settles for standing there, fists clenched, a muscle working in his jaw seemingly of its own accord. When he says nothing else she tries again.

"Please believe me when I tell you how sorry I am to have hurt you," she says. Her voice cracks a bit on 'sorry'. "I assure you it was only done out of the greatest need."

It comes out a little stiff, but he can see the glimmer of tears in her eyes, and he knows that Julia Montague doesn't cry for many things.

It's then that he suddenly unfreezes, and before he even knows what he's doing he's reaching for her, enclosing her in a tight embrace that makes her finally topple into quiet, choking sobs as she buries her face in his chest. He finds his face is suddenly wet with tears too as he holds her, one hand clasping the back of her head to his shoulder and the other pressing her so tightly to his body he's no longer sure where he ends and she begins.

"How?" he chokes out, and Julia shakes her head, fighting her tears.

"SO15 had me spirited away after St Matthew's. No one could know. We didn't know where the leak was, we couldn't risk..."

He suddenly doesn't want to hear it, doesn't want to have to digest the ins and outs of it and the fact that she must have thought it might be him. He just wants her, there in his arms, not dead not dead not dead.

So he holds her as close as he can and he kisses her instead, desperately, like a drowning man surfacing, and he thinks that maybe that's exactly what he is.

He doesn't know how, or why, or what this means. But this is a world where Julia Montague still lives and breathes, and he will not find fault with that. There will be questions with the morning, but for now he's by her side, which is where he thinks maybe he will always choose to be.

\---

He wakes into pale daylight, the morning a little grey but bright enough to warm the bedroom. He is momentarily disoriented, swimming in a brief jolt of that familiar adrenaline rush which sometimes takes away all control, but the feel of a warm body pressed all the way along his is enough to remind him that he's safe. He remembers all at once and experiences such a ferocious jolt of joy he almost gasps with it. Julia is alive.

She's still asleep, warm and steady as she lies with her back pressed to his front. One of his arms is slightly numb pillowed under her head but it would take another attempt on her life for him to risk disturbing this moment. He banishes that thought quickly, because he doesn't think he could actually survive another blow like thinking he'd lost her. The scars now just barely covered by the new growth of hair on his temple attest to the fact that he very nearly didn't make it through the last time that happened.

He detects the change in her breathing as she drifts into wakefulness; hears the little intake of her breath and knows she's thinking the same he did as she registers where she is. Slowly, carefully, she turns in his arms to face him, and gives a little murmur of discomfort as she moves.

He feels a little guilty, then, as he realises he hasn't even asked about the full extent of her injuries yet. They were so swept up in the tidal wave of pure feeling that they fell, quite desperately, back into each other's arms instead, and managed to say none of the things that really needed to be said before falling soundly asleep. He suspects neither of them has slept so well as that since before the day that blew them apart.

"Good morning, Sergeant Budd," she says softly, running her fingers down his jaw. He smiles and shifts his arms to pull her closer, quietly relishing the feel of her skin against his.

"Good morning," he replies, then frowns as he casts a glance down at her. "How are you feeling?" he asks, propping himself up on one arm so he can use the other to run down her side. She protests at the chill when he shifts the covers aside, and rolls her eyes at his examination.

"If I were in that bad a state I think you're about twelve hours too late to take appropriate measures, David," she says, sounding distinctly self-satisfied. He smiles a bit, but he doesn't relent.

"How bad is it?" he asks, studying her face closely. She's good at hiding her pain, but he's better at seeing through it. She sighs when she realises he won't let this go.

"I had broken ribs. Bruising and burns. Well, you can see," she says, gesturing down at herself. Her pale skin is now scarred too, mostly down her right side, and David runs the faintest of touches over the mottled marks mournfully. Not, of course, because of how they look, but because she only has them as a result of his failure. His failure to protect her 

She can obviously tell where his thoughts are going because she frowns and guides his face by his chin until he's looking at her again.

"David. I'm here with you. And I know you did everything you could. With that _woman_ leaking every single one of my security arrangements, how could you have prevented it?" She sounds fierce, angry on his behalf. He is moved, deeply so, by her clear absolution of him, but even that can't evaporate the deep well of his guilt.

"I should have done more to find her out," he says, voice low and shaking. "You never should have had to go through this."

"No-one's infallible," she says. "Without you, I'm sure I would be dead. But I'm not. We're both here now." She holds his hand tightly, and her grip tethers him to the alien feeling of hope.

"How did you do it?" David asks at last. It's the question that's been waiting to be asked since he first walked in. Julia takes in a breath.

"I didn't. Not really. Anne Sampson concocted the scheme while I was soundly unconscious. I bet she couldn't believe her luck, actually. Getting to bundle me out of the way while I was in a coma and then tell the whole world I'd died." She rolls her eyes but David can tell she's not really upset.

"But why would she do that? It wouldn't do much for her career for you to be killed on her watch."

"I suspect she imagined it would be significantly worse if I actually _did_ get killed on her watch, which I must admit was starting to look depressingly inevitable," says Julia, fiddling with the edge of the sheet. "I daresay there's never been a more shot-at politician who's lived to tell the tale."

“So you’ve been here all this time?”

“I was in hospital for the first weeks. Then they had me moved. It’s an SO15 safehouse. I was too drugged up to protest,” she says dryly. “How annoying to be in Anne Sampson’s debt after all.”

David laughs and rests his forehead against hers.

“Remind me to send her flowers,” he says. He pulls her to lie across his body, savouring the weight of her, the steady thud of her heart a blessed reminder of her precious life.  

"And what about now? I don't suppose you're planning on retiring from public life," he says. "Living out the rest of your days in a nice, safe leafy suburb."

Julia smiles, and actually there is a touch of regret in her eyes, he thinks. But she shakes her head.

"Haven't you heard, Sergeant Budd?" she says, smoothing her hand down his cheek. "The country's looking for a PM."

 


End file.
